Having A Great Dad Probably Permitted Me

Gary Shteyngart Has Written A Memoir For The Ages. I Spat Laughter On The First Page And Closed The Last With Wet Eyes. Un-put-down-able In The Day And A Half I Spent Reading It, Little Failure Is A Window Into Immigrant Agony And Ambition, Jewish Angst, And Anybody's Desperate Need For A Tribe. Readers Who've Fallen For Shteyngart's Antics On The Page Will Relish The Trademark Humor. But Here It's Laden And Leavened With A Deep, Consequential, Psychological Journey. Brave And Unflinching, Little Failure Is His Best Book To Date

I Kept The Fingers Of My Left Hand Crossed All The Time, While On My Right-hand Fingers I Counted Anything At All—steps To The Refrigerator, Seconds On The Clock, Words In A Sentence—to Keep My Head Occupied. The Counting Felt Like Something To Hang On To, As If Finding The Right Numbers Might Somehow Crack The Code On Whatever System Ran The Slippery Universe We Were Moving Through.

We Are In The Grip Of Some Big Machine Grinding Us Along. The Force Of It Simplifies Everything. A Weird Calm Settled Over Me From Inside Out. What Is About To Happen Has Stood In Line To Happen. All The Roads Out Of That Instant Have Been Closed, One By One.

In My Godless Household, Poems Were The Closest We Came To Sacred Speech -- The Only Prayers Said.

I'm Doomed To Act Like Myself, Even When It's Inconvenient!